Memeorandum

February 28, 2013

As elements of the Mass Hysteria Media question their role in promoting Obama's 'Apocalpyse Now' approach to the upcoming sequester, even the NY Times finds itself wondering about its commitment to cheerleading against the sequester.

First, they point out that there are liberals who love the idea of cutting defense and sparing entitlements:

WASHINGTON — With time running short and little real effort under way to
avert automatic budget cuts that take effect Friday, substantial and
growing wings of both parties are learning to live with — if not love —
the so-called sequester.

...

For weeks, President Obama has barnstormed the country, warning of the
dire consequences of the cuts to military readiness, educators, air
travel and first responders even as the White House acknowledges that
some of the disruptions will take weeks to emerge.

The reverse side has gone unmentioned: Some of the most liberal members
of Congress see the cuts as a rare opportunity to whittle down Pentagon
spending. The poor are already shielded from the worst of the cuts, and
the process could take pressure off the Democratic Party, at least in
the short run, to tamper with Social Security and Medicare.

My, my. The Times also wonders about the devastation we should expect at one minute after midnight of the sequestration. Or even one month...

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s
team concedes that the almost certain arrival of across-the-board
budget cuts on Friday will not immediately produce the politically
dramatic layoffs and airport delays that the administration has been
warning about for days.

But White House strategists say they believe that a constant drip of bad
news will emerge in Congressional districts across the country in the
weeks ahead, generating negative headlines and, they hope, putting
Republicans on the defensive for their refusal to raise taxes.

The mission of the Mass Hysteria Media is clear - somewhere out there a granny will be eating catfood or have a cat stuck in a tree because of the sequester, and it is their job to find that person, or cat, and bring them to John Boehner.

Yet the Times seems to be having a bit of angst about their assignment:

In accepting the inevitability of an extended Washington stalemate, the
White House is risking the possibility that Americans may eventually
blame the president, not members of Congress, for job losses, smaller
paychecks, longer lines at airports, a reduction in government services
and a less well-equipped military.

Mr. Obama could also ultimately emerge as a kind of president who cried
wolf if Americans just shrug at the slow-rolling budget cuts and think
the crisis atmosphere that he created was more hype than reality. On
Wednesday night, the president acknowledged to a group of business
leaders that “a lot of people may not notice the full impact of the
sequester” for weeks.

Well, yes, the public may think the President cried wolf and the media played along.

The battle lines are clear:

Republicans are trying to make the case to the American public that the
president and his staff are trying to frighten people by overstating how
difficult it will be for government agencies to trim their spending.
Mr. Boehner said in an interview on Wednesday on the CBS program “This
Morning” that the president had “traveled over 5,000 miles in the last
two weeks doing campaign-style events,” adding, “this is a time to
lead.”

Every news organization covering this has gone through cutbacks in the last few years. Yet they are now supposed to report to us that the provision of basic services will end if the government is cut back to funding levels last seen in, oh, 2008. One worries about an impending botox shortage as anchormen strain to keep a straight face.

February 26, 2013

ABC News explains that henceforth, they will save everybody time by sending Michelle Obama's factually challenged statements directly to the cutting room floor.

This is a win-win-win: Michelle can save time by simply free-associating without even a pretense of perparation; the Right Wing Noise Machine can save time by not having to rebut the silliness of Her Shrillness; and Team Obama can save a world of time by not having to defend her.

February 25, 2013

Baseball is here to rescue us from the NHL. And in what I hope is a joke, the Times includes this bit of spring training giddiness in their profile of Oriole Brian Roberts, who is coming off injuries and concussions:

Clearheaded Again, Oldest Oriole Is Back

That picture has me worried that he is still a llittle turned around, but maybe I am missing something.

The Times editors really can pick their spots - now they oppose DNA collection in order to protect the privact rights of arrestees:

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear argument
about whether it is constitutional for a state to collect DNA from
people charged with violent crimes but not yet convicted. Last April,
the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled
that a state law authorizing such collection violated the Fourth
Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

...

The Maryland law clearly contravenes the Fourth Amendment.

Clearly. So who is the Times fighting for? All of us, of course, but specifically, this thug:

The case involves the collection of DNA from Alonzo Jay King Jr. after
his arrest on assault charges in 2009. His DNA profile matched evidence
from a rape in 2003, and he was convicted of that rape.

The state did not, however, obtain a warrant to collect his DNA, nor did
it establish that it had probable cause to think that his DNA would
link him either to the assault or the rape. It did not even meet the
lowest threshold for some searches, by establishing that it had a
reasonable basis for taking his DNA, or showing that the DNA evidence
would disappear unless it was collected.

Maryland argues
that collecting and analyzing DNA is like fingerprinting. But the
purpose of fingerprinting is to identify someone who has been arrested.
Maryland was using DNA for investigative purposes, not identification,
and doing so without legal justification.

The fingerprinting point-counterpoint is ludicrous (and discussed here in the context of a similar California case). DNA is a prefectly plausible identification tool and the police routinely run new fingerprints through databases in order to solve crimes. Put it this way - if, after booking Mr. King, the police had run his fingerprints through a database and found a match to a knife found at the scene of an unsolved murder, would the Times be squawking?

And yes, these are the same Times editors that won't rest until we have a national gun registry, so their concern for our privacy is a very sometime thing.

Yes, we could run our criminal justice system Times-style. The result will be fewer rape cases solved and more of the wrongfully-convicted languishing in jail, but the privacy rights of those arrested (but not yet convicted!) of violent crimes will have been upheld. Do we all see a brighter tomorrow?

Here are twopapers discussing the issues. DNA does contain more information than fingerprints so there is a possibility of a loss of medical privacy, whoch could be mitigated with appropriate safeguards. If this Big Brother privacy concern from the same people screaming for National Health seems irreconciliable, well, you aren't smart enough to be a Lib either.

February 24, 2013

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, takes to the NY Times to warn us that much of the official reporting about enhanced interrogation is based on lies:

John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. official and now President Obama’s
nominee to head the agency, recently testified that the classified
report raised “serious questions” about information he received when he
was the agency’s deputy executive director. Mr. Brennan said publicly
what many of us — who were in interrogation rooms when the program was
devised — have been warning about for years: senior officials, right up
to the president himself, were misled about the enhanced interrogation
program.

That's interesting. We presume he has examples:

For instance, a 2005 Justice Department memo claimed that waterboarding
led to the capture of the American-born Qaeda member Jose Padilla in
2003. Actually, he was arrested in 2002, months before waterboarding
began, after an F.B.I. colleague and I got details about him from a
terrorist named Abu Zubaydah. Because no one checked the dates, the
canard about Mr. Padilla was repeated as truth.

Groan. That's it? We have hashed thisoutrereatedly - per the DoJ Inspector general's report (p. 111) and reporting in Newsweek and the NY Times, Zubaydah was captured in the spring of 2002. A team of CIA and FBI interrogators (including Mr. Soufan) worked on him, and the CIA moved to what the FBI described as "borderline torture" almost immediately. The memo authorizing enhanced interrogation was dated August 1, 2002 but some of the enhanced tecnhiques (but not waterboarding) were employed against Zubaydah before that date.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been
uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A.
officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the
harsh techniques were introduced later in August.

Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation
techniques — he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by
earsplittingly loud music — the genesis of practices later adopted by
some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence
Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas
prisons.

Not waterboarding, but not a good time, either. So how did that get dropped from Mr. Soufan's account?

And his current description of the OLC memo is false. Today, he writes this:

For instance, a 2005 Justice Department memo claimed that waterboarding
led to the capture of the American-born Qaeda member Jose Padilla in
2003.

Hmm. The memo claimed that enhanced interrogation techniques generally, not waterboarding specifically, led to Padilla. That said, the correct arrest date was May 2002, which means the harsh springtime interrogation of Zubaydah (prior to written approval of the EITs) was credited with the Padilla intel.

Based on Mr. Soufan's efforts I think it is fair to conclude that lies are being told about the enhanced interrogation program.

The topic is the origin of the sequester idea currently vexing Washington; the specific point of dispute is this claim by Woodward:

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the
Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the
deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s
point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an
option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax
increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President
Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011
included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the
sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an
agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18
months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation
in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president
asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts
but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a
balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those
in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not
the deal he made.

And Klein's rebuttal is pretty straightforward:

I don’t agree with my colleague Bob Woodward, who says
the Obama administration is “moving the goalposts” when they insist on a
sequester replacement that includes revenues. I remember talking to
both members of the Obama administration and the Republican leadership
in 2011, and everyone was perfectly clear that Democrats were going to
pursue tax increases in any sequester replacement, and Republicans were
going to oppose tax increases in any sequester replacement. What no one
knew was who would win.

“Moving the goal posts” isn’t a concept that actually makes any sense in
the context of replacing the sequester. The whole point of the policy
was to buy time until someone, somehow, moved the goalposts such that
the sequester could be replaced.

I think that is right. The sequester was meant to be a grim alternative to continued negotiations. To hold the attention of both parties it was designed to include components unappealing to both parties. At one point, the Democratic proposal was that Republcians would agree to automatic tax increases if the negotiations to replecae the sequester failed; Republicans hated that too much (and the expiration of all the Bush tax cuts was still in the future as of July 2011, which assured that taxes woiuld be re-negotiated), so Democrats agreeed that the Republican repellent would be automatic cuts in defense spending.

So both parties started negotiating for a trigger, as they called it —
an undesirable, automatic action that would slash deficits if Democrats
and Republicans could not. Mr. Obama and Democrats wanted a trigger
mandating automatic spending cuts and tax increases; Republicans
insisted on spending cuts only.

Democrats conceded, and that is when Mr. Lew — along with Gene Sperling,
director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council — proposed the
Gramm-Rudman sequestration. Given that law’s Republican parentage, the
Obama advisers figured this kind of trigger would appeal to Republicans,
and it did.

One might say that the Republican insistence that the sequester only include spending cuts was a continuation of their view which had led to the stalemate, and that by agreeing to cuts only, Obama was accepting their view. I suppose Woodward is taking that line in saying that Obama is now moving the goalposts. The guppy claims, I say correctly, that the proper football metaphor is "punt".

Whatever one’s ultimate judgment on the deal, it establishes a terrible
precedent in treating defense as a pot of money to be slashed if various
spending-control mechanisms don't work. It will thereby make it more
difficult to have a serious discussion of the military spending that’s
required for our national security needs. I assume the Republican
presidential candidate in 2012 will run on a platform of re-doing this
deal when he's in office to improve it considerably.

I infer that Kristol did not consider the goalposts to be set in stone.

As to the merits of the two positions, well, Obama got his tax increases to start the new year.

There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the
sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The
truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea.
But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is
who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared
mistake.

February 23, 2013

The NY Times profiles Yankee DH Travis Hafner with this baffler of a headline:

The Yankees’ One-Tool Player

C'mon - everyone knows the five tools are run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power. Hafner won't make Yankee fans forget Lou Gehrig but his career numbers suggest he is an adequate two-tooler at the plate.

Well, I don't think he is where we are pinning our (fading) hopes anyway.

To reduce the deficit in a weak economy, new taxes on high-income
Americans are a matter of necessity and fairness; they are also a
necessary precondition to what in time will have to be tax increases on
the middle class. Contrary to Mr. Boehner’s “spending problem” claim, much of the deficit
in the next 10 years can be chalked up to chronic revenue shortfalls
from the Bush-era tax cuts, which were only partly undone in the
fiscal-cliff deal earlier this year. (Wars and a recession also
contributed.) It stands to reason that a deficit caused partly by
inadequate revenue must be corrected in part by new taxes.

Painkillers like Vicodin that contain hydrocodone are the most widely
prescribed drugs in the United States — and the most widely abused
because they are relatively easy to obtain. The Food and Drug
Administration has an opportunity to help tighten restrictions on drugs
whose use has spiraled out of control over the past two decades.

It's the NY Times, so you know they want us to be more like Europe:

Many countries in Europe and elsewhere make little or no use of
hydrocodone products and do fine in treating their patients for pain.

Yeah, yeah. Peole are suffering in Eastern Europe, although with their entry into the EU they can now chew on fine Corinthian leather. Codeine products are available over the counter in Great Britain and other European countries (cf Nurofen Plus), and good luck trying to legalize that here.

On the spending side, Republicans are resisting cuts to defense. That
implies brutalizing cuts in nondefense discretionary areas, like
education and environment, which are already set to fall to their lowest
level as a share of the economy since the 1950s.

The budget is also missing the necessary financing for a public campaign
system that the governor has promised in his reform agenda. Advocates
for a system of matching funds like the one in New York City have
estimated that the state’s cost would be about $40 million a year. That
is a small price to pay to encourage small donors and limit the
influence of a few powerful special interests.

Just what we need. I look forward to Saturday and their calls for pestilence.

February 20, 2013

The research arm of the Department of Justice prepared a study on the likely efficacy of various gun control measures. Their thoughts on baning large capacity magazines (or, as the Times headlined, imposing size limits on bullet cartridges or limiting high capacity ammunition) are interesting:

In order to have an impact, large capacity magazine regulation needs to sharply curtail their availability to include restrictions on importation, manufacture, sale, and possession. An exemption for previously owned magazines would nearly eliminate any impact. The program would need to be coupled with an extensive buyback of existing large capacity magazines. With an exemption the impact of the restrictions would only be felt when the magazines degrade or when they no longer are compatible with guns in circulation. This would take decades to realize.

So unless a final bill excludes a grandfathering exemption and includes a buyback, it will be a Look Good, Feel Good measure unlikely to make any difference. With an effective ban, they conclude their might be an effect on (very rare) mass shootings.

FWIW, my Official Editorial Position has been that banning large capacity magazines is likely to be a political winner whether it makes sense or not. Criminals or aspiring mass shooters (who often display careful planning) will get large capacity magazines if they want them. Or, they may not bother - the Va Tech shooter used ten and fifteen round magazines in two handguns.

(Reuters) - The
CEO of a U.S. tire maker has delivered a crushing summary of how some
outsiders view France's work ethic in a letter saying he would have to
be stupid to take over a factory whose staff only put in three hours
work a day.

Titan International's Maurice
Taylor, nicknamed "The Grizz" for his negotiating style, told the
left-wing French industry minister in a letter published by media on
Wednesday that he had no interest in rescuing a plant set for closure.

"The
French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They
get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three,"
Taylor wrote on February 8 in the letter in English to the minister,
Arnaud Montebourg.

"I told this to
the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French
way!" Taylor added in the letter, which was posted by business daily Les Echos on its website and which the ministry confirmed was genuine.

"Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour wage and ship all the tiresFrance needs," he said. "You can keep the so-called workers."

WASHINGTON — Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, is
haunted by many things that emerged from the investigation of the
December mass shooting at a Newtown
elementary school. Among them is the nagging question of what prompted
the gunman, Adam Lanza, to put down his rifle after killing 20 children
and pick up the pistol he used to end his own life.

“We do know that historically in these instances, amateurs have trouble
switching magazines,” Mr. Murphy said, referring to the high-capacity
ammunition feeding device used by Mr. Lanza to shoot scores of bullets
in seconds. “I believe, and many of the parents there believe, that if
Lanza had to switch cartridges nine times versus two times there would
likely still be little boys and girls alive in Newtown today.”

It is that conviction that has helped put fresh scrutiny on the size of magazines as Congress debates new gun laws.

While influential lawmakers in both parties view a proposed ban on
assault weapons as politically toxic, lawmakers seem increasingly open
to a ban on high-capacity magazines, like the 15- and 30-round devices
that have been used in shooting rampages from Aurora, Colo., to Tucson,
where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, to Newtown.

WASHINGTON — Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of
earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else,
according to new data.

The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley,
show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But
there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by
11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4
percent.

As a great thinker with a grasp of statistics nearly said, the one percent will always be with us. But is it really the same group taking more money year after year, or are new faces arriving to exploit the rest of us? Ms. Lowrey and her editors maintain the pretense that the same evil-doers are continually oppressing the rest of us, for example here:

The data analyzed by Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez shows that income inequality
— as measured by the proportion of income taken by the top 1 percent of
earners — reached a modern high just before the recession hit in 2009.
The financial crisis and its aftermath hit wealthy families hard. But
since then, their earnings have snapped back, if not to their 2007 peak.

A retiring CEO who made it into the one-percent in 2007 by cashing in his stock options, or a homeowner who made it into the one-percent in 2007 by selling her home, have not seen their earnings snap back. This transience of onepercenterdom has been documented, but not in the Times.

And a harsher reality - the Pikkety-Saez numbers overlook important pieces of the compensation puzzle - is introduced only very late, and with a carefully palmed card:

Measures of inequality differ depending on whether they are measured
after or before taxes, and whether or not they include government
transfers like Social Security payments, food stamps and other credits.

Research led by the Cornell economist Richard V. Burkhauser, for instance, sought to measure the economic health of middle-class households
including income, taxes, transfer programs and benefits like health
insurance. It found that from 1979 to 2007, median income grew by about
18.2 percent over all rather than by 3.2 percent counting income alone.

Wait - do they mean that when looking at an employee's compensation we should consider the value of the employer-sponsored health insurance? Why yes they do and yes we should, but Ms. Lowrey promptly buries that:

In an interview, Mr. Burkhauser said his numbers measured “how are the
resources that person has to live on changing over time,” whereas Mr.
Piketty and Mr. Saez’s numbers measure “how are different people being
rewarded in the marketplace.”

Well, no, not since employer-sponsored health plans are an important part of most people's compensation.

We also learn that it is tough for high-earning Silcon Valley hotshots or Wall Street arbs to maintain their income stream elsewhere. Breakthrough stuff. Does the researcher actually have anything to say about the behavior of "the rich" who are not tied by geography to their jobs and might be free to relocate? Yes he does!

Of course, some people do move for tax reasons, especially wealthy
retirees, athletes and other celebrities without strong ties to high-tax
locations, like jobs and families.

...

A star like Mr. Depardieu “can go to Paris whenever he wants,” Mr. Shure
noted. Professor Tannenwald agreed. “People who are very rich, who are
retired or who aren’t tied to a particular location, do change their
residency at a high rate based on tax differentials.”

Boy, that shoots down that myth, doesn't it? The Times can be a great resource but Google is even more valuable.

February 15, 2013

February 14, 2013

As reassurance that the dogbarks and yes, the caravan passes by, the NY Times picks up on the link between suicide and guns.

They manage to make several important points:

Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85
percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of
cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

And yes, suicides can be prevented. For many people, especially teenagers, the suicidal impulse is transitory; if a quick and lethal gun is not available, by the time the would-be suicide cobbles something else together the urge has passed:

Suicidal acts are often prompted by a temporary surge of rage or
despair, and most people who attempt them do not die. In a 2001 study of
13- to 34-year-olds in Houston who had attempted suicide but were saved
by medical intervention, researchers from the C.D.C. found that, for
more than two-thirds of them, the time that elapsed between deciding to
act and taking action was an hour or less. The key to reducing
fatalities, experts say, is to block access to lethal means when the
suicidal feeling spikes.

They also offer a fascinating speculation on the correlation between gun ownership and suicide:

Still, some dispute the link, saying that it does not prove cause and effect, and that other factors, like alcoholism and drug abuse,
may be driving the association. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology
at Florida State University in Tallahassee, contends that gun owners may
have qualities that make them more susceptible to suicide. They may be
more likely to see the world as a hostile place, or to blame themselves when things go wrong, a dark side of self-reliance.

The dark side of self-reliance... hmm. Obama's Julia will never kill herself, since that would be taking charge of her own life; the boldest step she will ever take is voting for an even more compassionate Democrat.

This article is almost like reporting. No attempt is made to explain how an 'assault weapons' ban or limits on magazine capacity could bring down the suicide rate. And the one area where reforms might be helpful in preventing suicide - background check reporting on the mentally ill - goes unmentioned. For a bit on that, here is Dr. Swanson of Duke, who has been studying violence and mental illness for decades:

Depression is the particular psychiatric illness most strongly
associated with suicide. Social disadvantage plays a role both in the
etiology of depressive illness and disparities in its treatment.
Depression is not, however, a disorder that gets most patients a
gun-disqualifying record of involuntarily commitment. In other words,
people suffering from the one mental health condition that is most
closely and frequently linked to suicidality are unlikely to show up in a
gun background check.

I was afraid of that. And the side effects of some common anti-depression drugs include the promotion of suicidal thoughts, so the web is tangled.

To date, the only empirical evidence that gun restrictions on people
with a history of mental illness might prevent firearm violence in the
US population comes from a national evaluation of the Brady Act (Ludwig & Cook, 2000).
That study found that gun purchaser background checks and waiting
periods had no significant effect on homicide rates, but did reduce the
suicide rate by 6 percent in people over age 55.

Glenn links to a mysterious tweet by a mysterious twit from Media Matters:

Eric Boehlert:

what press cannot bring itself to report this week: Dems have NEVER EVER
mounted a campaign to block cabinet pick the way GOP is w/ Hagel

Bryan Preston responds with two words - John Tower.

I will respond with an excerpt from the NY Times, which is one of the few media outlets that might be to the left of Media Matters:

Blocking such a high-level presidential appointee is a rare move. Since
1917, when the Senate’s modern filibuster rules were created, a
cabinet-level nominee has faced a supermajority barrier to confirmation
only twice: Ronald Reagan’s nominee for commerce secretary in 1987, C.
William Verity Jr., and George W. Bush’s nominee for interior secretary
in 2006, Dirk Kempthorne.

I guess it depends on what Boehlert means by "this way". Maybe if he is defining "this way" to be "rejecting a turncoat from their own party" he has a point.

Otherwise, we are left to conclude that the media is soft-pedaling the idea of an unprecedented-except-for-the-precedents breach of Senatorial etiquette because it was OK when Reagan or Bush were President. Tough call.

Simply put, we’re in uncharted territory. Look at it this way: Hagel
is on course to be the first Pentagon nominee and only the third Cabinet
nominee ever to face a 60-vote requirement for confirmation. But even
that understates it, because the other two – C. William Verity and Dirk
Kempthorne – weren’t up against serious filibusters.

Verity was a
70-year-old retired steel executive when he was nominated by Ronald
Reagan in 1987 to run the Commerce department. His nomination wasn’t
particularly controversial, but it did stir the ire of the far right.
(Hard as it is to believe now, there were plenty of conservative leaders
who doubted Reagan’s commitment to the cause during his presidency.) At
issue was Verity’s enthusiasm for increased trade between the United
States and the Soviet Union, a no-no for any Cold War-era hawk. Verity
had previously spoken out against the Reagan administration’s policy of
linking the emigration of Soviet Jews to trade goals.

This
prompted Jesse Helms, who was a regular thorn in Reagan’s side in the
‘80s, to mount a filibuster. But it only succeeded in slowing down the
nomination for a few days; when it was filed, the cloture motion passed
on an 85-8 vote. The final tally for Verity’s October ’87 confirmation:
84-11.

The other Cabinet choice to confront a filibuster was Dirk
Kempthorne, George W. Bush’s pick to run the Interior department in
2006. Kempthorne was Idaho’s governor at the time, and he was also a
former senator. The filibuster against him amounted to election year
grandstanding by Florida’s Bill Nelson, who was up for reelection that
November. To protest the Bush administration’s efforts to encourage oil
and gas drilling off his state’s coast, Nelson placed a hold on the
Kempthorne nomination, forcing Republicans to come up with 60 votes.
Again, this slowed the nomination slightly, but it was purely a symbolic
stand. Cloture passed by an 85-8 margin and Kempthorne was approved by the full Senate on a voice vote.

A guest piece at The Hill has even more examples, including previous Republican blocking maneuvers:

Cloture was attempted successfully to end filibusters of the
nominations of: Dirk Kempthorne for secretary of the Interior in 2006;
Robert J. Portman for U.S. Trade Representative in 2005; Stephen L.
Johnson for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
in 2005; Michael O. Leavitt for EPA Administrator in 2003; and C.
William Verity for secretary of Commerce in 1987. Every one of these
nominees were chosen by Republican administrations and primary support
for each filibuster came from Democrats in the Senate including, in some
cases, current President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of
State Kerry and former Secretary of State Clinton.

Further, a
cloture attempt was withdrawn to end a filibuster of Hilda Solis,
outgoing Secretary of Labor in the Obama Administration. And by
unanimous consent, the Senate agreed to a 60-vote threshold (the same as
required to overcome a filibuster) for confirmation of two other Obama
Administration cabinet nominees – Kathleen Sebelius for secretary of
Health and Human Services and John Bryson for secretary of Commerce.

So,
coming back to the question of whether to filibuster the Hagel
nomination, we see that not only are filibusters of cabinet-level
nominees not unprecedented, there are several such precedents. An
alternate anti-filibuster argument is that there has never been a
successful filibuster of a cabinet-level nominee, but this claim is also
false. It is difficult – if not impossible – to show that such a
filibuster has never succeeded, given the broad definition of the term.
Several cabinet-level nominees have withdrawn following delays on
consideration of their nominations. John R. Bolton’s nomination by
President George W. Bush to be U.S. Permanent Representative to the
United Nations – a cabinet-level position under Presidents Clinton and
Obama but not President Bush – also was not confirmed after a concerted,
Democratic-led filibuster. Bolton received a recess appointment in 2005
and left office at the end of 2006 after the Senate again failed to act
on his nomination.

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have
committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill
represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime
overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated
as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only
4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI
as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by
people without any mental-health problems at all.

And - finally - we see an example of this statistic buttressed by a source; here is The American Prospect:

The stereotype that the mentally ill are very violent is simply incorrect. According to the National Institute for Mental Health,
people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia, are up to three
times more likely to be violent, but “most people with [severe mental
illness] are not violent and most violent acts are not committed by
people with [severe mental illness.]” On the whole, those with mental
illness are responsible for only 5 percent of violent crimes.

And now we get to the truth. Following the link to the Institute of Medicine ("only 5 percent of violent crimes") and downloading "Improving the Quality of Health Care for Mental and Substance-Use Conditions: Quality Chasm Series, 2005", we find this (my emphasis):

The first large-scale epidemiological data on the prevalence and incidence of violence (assaultive behavior) among individuals with M/SU ill- nesses were produced in the early 1980s as a part of the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) study, which was designed primarily to determine the prevalence of untreated psychiatric illnesses in community populations across the United States.16 A secondary analysis of these data (Swanson, 1994) found that the vast majority of individuals with mental illness who had not qualified for a substance-use or -dependence diagnosis in the past year were not violent.

Even among individuals with major mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia) having no co-occurring substance-use diagnosis, the proportion committing an act of violence was only somewhat higher than that in the population without mental illness. Only about 7 percent of those with a major mental illness (but without a substance-use or dependence diagnosis) had engaged in any assaultive behavior in the preceding year, compared with slightly more than 2 percent of individuals without any major psychiatric diagnosis.

Individuals with less-severe mental illness were at no greater risk of committing an act of violence than those with no mental illness. Because major mental illness is a relatively rare occurrence, individuals with mental illnesses (but without a substance-use or -dependence diagnosis) account for a very small proportion (about 3–5 percent) of the risk of violence in a community.

Substance-use illnesses by themselves and in combination with major mental illnesses were found to be related more strongly to violence. The ECA study found a 1-year violence prevalence rate of 19.7 percent among respondents with a substance-use or -dependence diagnosis without the presence of a major mental illness, and rate of 22 percent among those with dual mental and substance-use or -dependence diagnoses. Individuals with substance-use or -dependence diagnoses alone represented 26–27 percent of the risk of violence in the community, while those with both diagnoses contributed a much smaller share of the risk (5–6 percent) because of their smaller numbers.17

That is heavy going, but my reading is that people with just mental illness account for roughly 3-5 percent of all violent crime; people with a dual diagnosis of mental illness plus substance abuse account for another 5-6 percent of violent crime. Taken together, people with mental illness account for 8-11 percent of violent crime.

Having said that, let's note that the Prof. Swanson of the 1994 paper under discussion is still writing, and says this:

Epidemiological studies in the community have found that the vast
majority of people with serious mental illnesses do not commit violent
acts toward others, and that the vast majority of violent acts are not
attributable to mental illness (Fazel & Grann, 2006; Swanson, 1994).
These studies would suggest that even if we completely eliminated
mental illness as a violence risk factor, the population prevalence of
violent acts towards others would go down by less than 4 percent.

Having paged through his 1994 paper by way of Google Preview, I see that he attributes 3-5 percent of violence in a community to the mentally ill-only, and another 4.8-5.7 percent to the dual diagnosis group(mentally ill plus substance abuse). I don't see any explanation for dropping the dual group from the total but I do see the opposite - he cites an earlier paper in which he argued against counting mentally ill substance abusers as 'false positives' for mental illness. Haven't tracked that down yet.

Mental Illness Policy Org. (founder) claims to provide fair coverage. They have this summary on the topic, which includes a citation ("The Economic Costs of Mental Illness", H. Harwood, A. Ameen, G. Denmead et al) that leads to the Lewin Group report, p. 5-17 (my emphasis):

Research to date strongly indicates that it is the mental disorders involving psychoses, such as schizophrenia, paranoia, and bipolar disorder (termed severe and persistent mental illness in this study), that involve increased risk of violence. The most recent research has found that among the SPMI population the vast majority of violence is among the population that suffers from both SPMI and substance-related disorders.

The SPMI population without substance-related disorders may be responsible for no more than about 3 percent of violent crime, with 3 to five times as much violence accounted for by the dually-diagnosed (SPMI and substance disorders) population. Costs for the dually diagnosed are accounted for in studies of alcohol and drug abuse. The population experiencing other mental illness (not SPMI) present only a modest increase in risk of violence (about twice as great) compared to the population with no current mental illness.

The Mental Illness Policy Org. summarizes that as follows:

Using National Comorbidity Survey data, this report concluded that, for
individuals with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI), "the SPMI
population without substance-related disorders may be responsible for no
more than about 3 percent of violent crime, with 3 to 5 times as much
violence accounted for by the dually diagnosed (SPMI and substance
disorders) population" (section on crime, p. 1.5). The study also
assumed that the percentages for homicides were the same as for "violent
crime" (section on crime-related costs, p. 6.8). Thus, SPMI individuals
with no substance abuse disorders were said to be responsible for no
more than 3 percent of homicides, but individuals with SPMI and alcohol
or drug abuse were responsible for between 9 and 15 percent of
homicides.

So they would claim that the 'mentally ill only' group accounts for 3 percent of violent crime and the "mentallly ill plus substance abusing" accounts for 9 to 15 percent of crime, for a total of 12-18 percent of violent crime committed by the mentally ill.

Well. One study says 8-11 percent, another days 12-18 percent. Neither is suggesting that Kathleen Sebelius is near the mark with her estimate of 3-5 percent.

Which is disturbing. Progressives such as Obama will want to poo-pooh the mental health problem and focus on limiting the public's access to guns. Are they merely misleading the public, which would be troubling but not unheard of in our political class, or are they unaware of the truth and busily misleading themselves?

I'd hate to see our President start a war on guns based on phony intelligence.

AND AS THE TIDE RECEDES... These surveys were done decades ago and the homicide rate has fallen by roughly half since then. If (IF!) we have made equal progress on all fronts then the mentally ill will be committing a smaller absolute number of crimes and their proportion of the mix will be unchanged.

But that is an evidence-free assumption. Suppose we have made tremendous progress deterring and/or detaining common criminals and that the decline of the crack wars has reduced crime by substance abusers but we have made no headway on dealing with violence by the mentally ill. In that case, the absolute number of violent crimes committed bvy the mentally ill would be roughly unchanged but it would represent twice as high a proportion of total violent crime since the base is now so much lower.

In which case, even the baseline of 3-5 percent ov violent crime committed by mentally ill non-substance abusers is outdated and would need to be doubled to reflect our new, lower crime rates.

Which is it? It's interesting to see how the Reality-Based Community, lovers of science and evidence all, have such confidence in their current answers.

I SEE RIGHT THROUGH THIS STAT:

Amongst the analysis presented by the Mental Illness Policy group is this study of the Indiana prison population:

In the first large study carried out in the United States, it has
been reported that 10 percent of all homicides are committed by
individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other psychotic
illnesses, most of whom were not being treated. The study was carried
out by Jason Matejkowski, Sara Cullen, and Phyllis Solomon, social
workers in the School of Policy and Practice at the University of
Pennsylvania. It was published in a recent issue of the Journal of the
American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

The authors identified everyone in the Indiana state prison
system who had been convicted of homicide between 1990 and 2002, a total
of 1,397 individuals. The records of a random sample of 723 of these
were examined, of which 518 had sufficient information to ascertain
whether or not they had received a psychiatric diagnosis. Among the 518
individuals convicted of homicide, 53, or 10.2 percent, had been
diagnosed with schizophrenia (n=27), other psychotic disorders not
associated with drug abuse (n=14), or bipolar disorder (n=12). An
additional 42 individuals had been diagnosed with mania or major
depressive disorder, for a total of 95 individuals out of the 518
studied, or 18.3 percent, having a psychiatric diagnosis.

They include this caveat:

It should be noted that the study included only those
individuals who committed homicides and were sentenced to prison; it did
not include individuals with severe psychiatric disorders who were
found to be incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of
inanity [sic] and therefore committed to a psychiatric facility instead of
prison.

A caveat they do not include - Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, won't be standing trial or going to death row. Nor will the Clackamas shooter.

The NY Times surveyed their archives back in 2000 and identified 102 killers in 100 "rampage" attacks going back fifty years. Among their conclusions:

They do not try to get away. In the end, half turn their guns on
themselves or are shot dead by others. They not only want to kill, they
also want to die.

On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo’s administration again delayed making a decision
on whether to allow hydraulic fracturing, a controversial drilling
method used to extract natural gas from rock formations like the Marcellus Shale, which extends from the Appalachian Mountains to New York.

Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, has been under review by
state regulators since before Mr. Cuomo took office in January 2011. But
the governor has had difficulty deciding, vacillating between allowing gas drilling
in the Southern Tier of New York — near the Pennsylvania border — and
continuing to ban it. In a letter on Tuesday, the state’s health
commissioner, Dr. Nirav R. Shah, said that a review by his agency of the
potential effects on health from the drilling was continuing, and he
recommended that the administration not move forward until it was
completed.

Without the report, the state will not meet a deadline this month to
issue a new environmental impact statement, and that will likely require
it to start the regulatory process over and begin a new 45-day comment
period.

The party of science and evidence already knows the answer - fracking sucks! - and they won't let a silly report sway them.

Cuomo just needs to keep running out the clock until somebody somewhere can give him the answer he needs - fracking can't be done in liberal New York.

But officials who have discussed the matter with the governor have said
that his hesitation is principally political, not scientific. Mr. Cuomo,
a Democrat, faces strident opposition on his party’s left, and
activists are continually protesting in Albany against fracking.

On the other hand, the governor has said that economic development is a
priority, even as the state’s unemployment rate has fallen behind the
national average during his time in office.

Hmm - bringing in Big Oil as a counterweight to Big Finance might be salutory for New York politics. And one might think that Cuomo will want a positive record on job creation, since Hillary is going to take full credit for the late 90's boom.

OurPeerless Leader recycled yet another timeless classic fromthe liberal playbook in his State of the Union address, exhorting Congress to spend some more of other people's money by raising the minimum wage.

The Times will never tire of this idea, so let's check their reporting. This nugget defies credulity, but is presented uncritically:

The White House said that the move would have profoundly positive
effects for low-income families without unduly burdening businesses or
raising the unemployment rate. It cited research showing “no detectable
employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen
in the United States.” The White House also pointed to companies like
Costco, the retail discount chain, and Stride Rite, a children’s shoe
seller, that have previously supported increasing the minimum wage as a
way to reduce employee turnover and improve workers’ productivity.

Now wait - surely they can't mean that CostCo thinks that paying a higher wage to its own workers would reduce turnover but only if other firms were also obliged to raise wages? Even a Times reporter might be able to guess that CostCo would have an even easier time retaining good employees if it paid above the current minimum wage.

In fact, the CostCo CEO in question has the classic corporatist view of using government as a way of imposing costs on his competitors while extracting benefits for his own firm. Here is the WaPo, describing their strategy during the 2006/07 minimum wage scuffle. CostCo already pays above the minimum but woul dlike to burden its competitors and see more money in the pockets of their customers who keep their jobs (my emphasis):

Jim Sinegal, a maverick entrepreneur who founded Costco in 1983 and has
resisted Wall Street pressure to cut wages and benefits for his 130,000
employees, said he signed onto the effort because he thinks a higher
minimum wage would be good for the nation's economy as well as its
workers.

"The more people make, the better lives they're going to have and the
better consumers they're going to be," Sinegal said in an interview.
"It's going to provide better jobs and better wages."

...

Sinegal is one of dozens of business owners and executives [that]... are lending their voices to an effort called Business
for a Fair Minimum Wage, a project of Business for Shared Prosperity,
an organization of "forward-thinking business owners, executives and
investors committed to building enduring economic progress on a strong
foundation of opportunity, equity and innovation," according to the
organization's Web site.

Chuck Collins, the organization's director, described the group as
"high-road businesses" that are already "paying well over the minimum
wage" to their employees and must compete with companies that pay less.
The group, Collins said, is "as nonpartisan as it gets." However, in its
maiden campaign, Business for Shared Prosperity has teamed with Let
Justice Roll, a coalition of church and community groups that also
includes the AFL-CIO, the big labor federation.

Costco, of Issaquah, Wash., would suffer no direct impact from a higher
minimum wage because its lowest-paid employees now make about $11 an
hour, Sinegal said, adding that the average worker in the company's 504
stores in the United States makes $17 an hour.

"In my view, some of these industries that pay minimum wage are
constantly turning their people," Sinegal said. "They spend more on
turnover than they would in paying the additional wages."

I have no doubt the White House backgrounders parrotted the CostCo agenda to the Times, but is it too much to ask to expect the Times to poke at that assertion a bit? Maybe a subscription to Google (or Bing!) would be a helpful enhancement to their new effort, and would allow them to move beyoned mere White House stenography. Ahh, what am I saying?

Jared Bernstein, a former economics advisor to Joe Biden, love the idea of raising the minimum wage, so we don't expect much critical thinking from him in recounting the White House fact sheet. Still, I love this:

From the WH fact sheet:

Raising the minimum wage mostly benefits adults, and especially working women: Around 60 percent of workers benefiting from a higher minimum wage are women, and few are teenagers – less than 20 percent.

Yeah, yeah. But what about college kids and recent graduates? Based on 2010 data, the Current Population Survey shows that,of 4.3 million workers at (or below, if they have tip-based income) the minimum wage, 2.1 million are aged 16-24 and 2.2 million are 25 or older. At a guess, roughly 20% are 16-19 (teenagers), 30% are 20-24 and 50% are 25 and up.

And as an anti-poverty program, raising the minmum wage is hunting with a shotgun (Sorry, Times readers, that must be a baffling metaphor - a shotgun fires pellets over a broad area; a rifle fires one bullet at the target). Let's go back to the the Times coverage of his speech:

“Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids
that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s
wrong,” Mr. Obama said in his State of the Union address
Tuesday night. “Let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on earth,
no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.”

First of all, we have anti-poverty programs, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, for those rare cases of people stuck year after year in a minimum wage job with a stay-at-home spouse.

Here is the CBO from 2006 on poverty and the minimum wage. Their gist - roughly 14% of the workers who would be immediately affected by the proposed increase in the minimum wage had family incomes below the poverty line after adjusting for transfers and anti-poverty programs. And roughly 15% of the wage increases due to raising the minimum would go to these families. Raising the minimum wage is not a targeted response to a problem of low-skilled, low-paid workers who can't manage an occasional merit raise.

But we don't expect logic or evidence to play into this debate. Democrats live to spend other people's money and raising the minimum wage lets them do so without even needing to pretend to worry about the deficit.

MORE: The Bureau of Labor Statistics prepares an annual report on the Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers with lots of demographic data. Here is 2011. Here is their first bullet point:

Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25
represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up
about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among
employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 23 percent earned the minimum
wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over.

February 11, 2013

Fomrer Times editor Bill Keller, who presumably has no angst about whether corporations have a Constitutional right to a free press, explains that corporations don't have a right to religious freedom.

This is all part of the ObamaCare shuffle on contraceptive coverage, but we implore Mr. Keller to send better strawmen:

“If an employer can craft a benefits system around his religious
beliefs, that’s a slippery slope,” said Marci Hamilton, a professor at
the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a critic of religious
exemptions. “Can you deny treatment of AIDS victims because your
religion disapproves of homosexuals? What if your for-profit employer is
a Jehovah’s Witness, who doesn’t believe in blood transfusions?”

A slippery slope! But is this really new ground? We have had Catholic organizations dealing with the AIDS issue for the last thirty years. Let me quote PBS:

RAY SUAREZ: Judy, there's a massive audience for
whatever the Catholic Church teaches in this regard, because you have to
remember that, with over 1 billion members around the world, one out of
every six people on planet Earth is a Catholic.

And the Catholic Church has been very hard at work in the hardest-hit
countries in the world when it's come to the scourge of HIV and AIDS.
There are, in fact, 117,000 Catholic medical facilities, from clinics in
the deepest jungle to large urban hospitals in the developing world,
that are involved in treating both people that are already infected with
AIDS and trying to prevent the transmission to at-risk populations.

In places like New York, which leads the country in reported AIDS cases,
Catholic institutions, with heavy financial support from the
Government, have been major providers of care to AIDS patients.

The problem is on the contraception side:

But citing its moral imperatives, the church has resisted teaching
prevention messages widely recommended by public health officials, like
the use of condoms or instructions on cleaning hypodermic needles used
for intravenous drugs. Church officials say that the only morally
correct way to prevent AIDS is by avoiding drugs and by practicing
fidelity within marriage and abstinence outside it.

Both John
Cardinal O'Connor, head of the Archdiocese of New York, and his director
of health and hospitals declined to be interviewed, but his spokesman,
Joseph G. Zwilling, said that even with the constraints on what
information hospitals provide, he is confident of the treatment they
offer.

"We believe we provide excellent care for our patients," he said.

And Sandra Fluke's alma mater specifically excludes contraceptive coverage but makes no mention of excluding AIDS treatment. However, they will cover experimental AIDS drugs in a clinical trial, which strongly suggests they will cover conventional AIDS treatment as well.

As to the Jehovah's Witness puzzle, I stand by my tirade from one year ago - we have had employer sponsored health coverage and Jehovah's Witnesses co-existing for decades. Has there been a problem up to now?

Mr. Keller leaves us laughing with this:

Also, courts tend to distinguish between laws that make you do something
and laws that merely require a financial payment. In the days of the
draft, conscientious objectors were exempted from conscription. A
sincere pacifist could not be obliged to kill. But a pacifist is not
excused from paying taxes just because he or she objects to the money
being spent on war. Doctors who find abortions morally abhorrent are not
obliged to perform them. But you cannot withhold taxes because some of
the money goes to Medicaid-financed abortion.

...

I don’t know what the courts will say, but common sense says the contraception dispute is more like taxation than conscription.

(b) Exception:
Government may substantially burden a person's exercise of religion
only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person-

(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and

(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

There are serious questions about whether, in a land of free family planning clinics, the employer insurance mandate is the least restrictive means of accomplishing this governmental goal. Maybe an employer mandate looks less like conscription and more like a tax, but a tax to fund clinics would really look like a tax, and is consistent with current policy.

February 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — If President Obama
tuned in to the past week’s bracing debate on Capitol Hill about
terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he might have
recognized the arguments his critics were making: He once made some of
them himself.

Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush
finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular
application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors
complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of
security.

No kidding. If Glenn Greenwald survives the aneurysm this story induces I expect he will have a colorful response. In the meantime, his column from January 18 2011 remains a classic:

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are
three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama’s behavior. First,
it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the
Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong. The
same theme is constantly sounded by conservatives who point out Obama’s
continuation of these policies: that he criticized those policies as a
candidate out of ignorance and partisan advantage, but once he became
President, he realized they were right as a result of accessing the
relevant classified information and needing to keep the country safe
from the Terrorist threat. Goldsmith, for instance, claimed Obama
changed his mind about these matters “after absorbing the classified
intelligence and considering the various options.” GOP Sen. Susan
Collins told the NYT‘s Baker that Obama “is finding that many
of those policies were better-thought-out than they realized.” Cheney
boasted that Obama “obviously has been through the fires of becoming
President and having to make decisions and live with the consequences.”

There is that.

There is interesting but incomplete nuance at the Times:

The dissonance is due in part to the fact that Mr. Obama ran in 2008
against Mr. Bush’s first-term policies but, after winning, inherited Mr.
Bush’s second-term policies.

By the time Mr. Bush left office, he had shaved off some of the more
controversial edges of his counterterrorism program, both because of
pressure from Congress and the courts and because he wanted to leave
behind policies that would endure. He had closed the secret C.I.A.
prisons, obtained Congressional approval for warrantless surveillance
and military commissions, and worked to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

So while Mr. Obama banned harsh interrogation techniques, he preserved
much of what he inherited, with some additional safeguards; expanded Mr.
Bush’s drone campaign; and kept on veterans of the antiterrorism wars
like Mr. Brennan. Some efforts at change were thwarted, like his vow to
close the Guantánamo prison and to try Sept. 11 plotters in civilian
court.

The enhanced interrogation program was scaled back but not banned under Bush.

Glenn links to Ann Althouse, who is wondering about the link between "gun violence" and mental health. Apparently mental health advocates are worried about the possible stigmatization of the mentally ill and are making claims such as this:

"But it can’t be that we turn our attention just to mental health issues
related to gun violence because people suffering from mental illness
make up a very small percentage of the perpetrators of gun
violence."....

That figure is composed of roughly 19,000 suicides and 11,000 homicides. One might imagine that a notable proportion of the suicide victims qualify as mentally ill. But for some reason, when the subject is mental health, "gun violence" seems to mean exclusively homicides, at least at the Times, and in the piece linked above.

Yet more evidence that I will never have the mental acuity or agility to make it as a lib.

MORE QUESTIONS I CAN'T ANSWER: Per the "might imagine" link above comes this non-surprise:

Mental illness is a major risk factor for suicide. The
World Health Organization estimates that 90 percent of all suicide
victims have some kind of mental health condition--often depression or
substance abuse.

But what does that mean from a policy perspective in Prozac Nation? If I were giving advice to someone with a history of depression (or a drinking problem) I would strongly discourage them from keeping a gun in the house (that is knowing nothing whatsover about the external dangers they might face in their specific neighborhood or life). However I am full of good advice yet far too humble to think my good advice should be turned into law.

February 09, 2013

Byron York notes that with the public worried about jobs, jobs, jobs (and the interplay of jobs and illegal immigration), Team Obama is worried about immigramt amnesty and gun control.

The disconnect is very familiar. Former Fed Vice Chairmen Alan Blinder just published a book about the Great Recession, and the Times had this to say:

He suggests that the president’s reluctance to focus “like a laser beam
on the economy” — and his decision instead to take on health care reform
too — resulted in “a scattershot approach” to policy that left people
confused about his priorities and unconvinced that “things would have
been much worse without the stimulus” and other rescue plans. Mr.
Blinder contends that the public still believes what he calls “the false
notion that the government gave away money to the banks. (It actually made loans and equity investments).”

“It is a measure of the Obama administration’s ineptitude in
communication,” Mr. Blinder notes, “that the public came to see
Geithner, Summers, & Company as tools of Wall Street while at the same time
the bankers who were saved from oblivion came to hate the
administration for vilifying and scapegoating them. Acquiring one of
those two images was excusable, maybe even unavoidable. Acquiring both at the same time amounted to gross political negligence.”

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline and Charles Cooke of NRO note that the media originally buried the political elements of the Dorner manifesto; the spectacle of an Obama-praising, NRA-bashing cop-killer on a murderous rampage doesn't really fit a convenient mass-media template the way it would if Dorner were an avowed Tea Partier.

But then again, sometimes silence is golden - now that the Times has discovered the rest of the Dorner document, they fgeel obliged to note that he makes some good points:

LOS ANGELES — For the Los Angeles Police Department, the allegations of
departmental corruption and racism by a former police officer now
accused of a revenge-fueled killing rampage are the words of a
delusional man, detached from the reality of the huge improvements the
force has undergone over the years.

“These are the rantings of a clearly very sick individual,” William J.
Bratton, a former department commissioner, said Friday. “It would be a
shame if he was able to rally to his cause people who remember the bad
old days of the L.A.P.D.”

Yet for whatever changes the department has undergone since the days
when it was notorious as an outpost of rampant racism and corruption,
the accusations by the suspect — however disjointed and unhinged — have
struck a chord. They are a reminder, many black leaders said, that some
problems remain and, no less significant, that memories of abuses and
mistreatment remain strong in many parts of this city.

“Our community doesn’t need this,” said the Rev. William D. Smart, the
president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern
California. “We don’t need something like this opening old wounds.”

“While there been a lot of improvements, there’s still room for
improvement,” he said. “There is still one segment of our community that
historically distrusts the police force.”

I am still searching the Times archives for their validation of the notion that Timothy McVeigh made some good points about Federal excesses at Waco. I haven't found it yet...

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia
said that the administration’s proposal, at first glance, had “struck
some people as a modest improvement.” The proposal, he said, appeared to
increase the number of religiously affiliated entities that could claim
exemption from the requirement.

But on closer examination, the archbishop said, the federal mandate “remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed.”

“The White House has made no concessions to the religious conscience
claims of private businesses, and the whole spirit of the ‘compromise’
is minimalist,” Archbishop Chaput said.

In court cases, judges have expressed keen interest in details of the
arrangements for contraceptive coverage. The most difficult question,
which the administration has yet to resolve, is how coverage will be
provided and financed for employees of self-insured faith-based
institutions, which serve as both employers and insurers.

The NY Times builds on news they broke last Sunday while burnishing Hillary's halo - a plan put together by David Petraeus (then heading the CIA) and Hillary Clinton (as SecState) to arm select Syrian rebels was backed by Defense chief Leon Panetta and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but rejected by "the White House" (presumably, the rejection was by actual humans, with Obama endorsing the rejection).

The Times tackled the decision process:

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus presented the proposal to the White House,
according to administration officials. But with the White House worried
about the risks, and with President Obama in the midst of a re-election bid, they were rebuffed.

Wow, team Obama trading Syrian corpses for American votes. Later, the plan was overtaken by other events:

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for... well, a CIA head who can keep his pants on and a Secretary of State who can keep her feet under herself.

The WaPo editors exhort Obama to get involved in Syria. However, former Marine officer C.J. Chivers of the NY Times, who knows his weapons, explains that after the fall of Qadaffi a lot of Libyan arms were shaken loose. Some ended up in Mali and turned the tide of battle in favor of the rebels, precipitating the current French intervention.

Since the war that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi began in 2011,
arms-tracking analysts have warned that weapons looted from the
colonel’s stockpiles could find their way to militants in sub-Saharan
Africa.

...

In the case of Mali, the reports appeared alongside signs of the growing
strength of jihadists in the country’s north. The timing, researchers
said, suggested that weapons from Libya had changed the course of Mali’s
war — so much so that the French military eventually intervened.

Recent photographs from Mali provide perhaps the clearest publicly
available indication yet that these transfers have in fact occurred.

Very interesting. Of course, we intervened in Libya ostensibly to protect the civilian population. Back then, the R2P ("Responsibility to Protect") crowd was well represented inside the White House and carried the day over the objections of Gates of Defense:

Inside the administration, senior officials
were lined up on both sides. Pushing for military intervention was a group of
NSC staffers including Samantha Power,
NSC senior director for multilateral engagement; Gayle Smith, NSC senior director for global development; and Mike McFaul, NSC senior director for
Russia. .

On the other side of the ledger were some Obama
administration officials who were reportedly wary of the second- and third-degree
effects of committing to a lengthy military mission in Libya. These officials
included National Security Advisor Tom
Donilon and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was also opposed to attacking Libya and had
said as much in several public statements.

Chris Dorner is a bitterly aggrieved former cop and former Navy man who served in Afghanistan who has sworn to kill the Los Angeles Police Department. So far he is a suspect in the killing of three people - the daughter of a fomrer LAPD named by Dorner in his diatribe, her fiance, and an LAPD cop ambushed at a traffic light while on routine patrol.

The LAPD is shooting back aggressively, which is grim news for the embattled citizens:

An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers
when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD
officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked
nothing like the suspect.

Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her
daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in
Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives
apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the
33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and
injuring two others.

Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the
back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches
on her finger.

"The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the
goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn't take the
time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don't look like a
large black man," Jonas said.

"We trust that the LAPD will step up and do the right thing and
acknowledge that what they did was unacceptable, and we'll deal with it," Jonas said.

...

Television images from the scene of the shooting showed newspapers
scattered alongside the blue pickup and in the bed of the bullet-ridden
vehicle, which sat on the street for hours after the shooting. Jonas
said the vehicle was also "the wrong color and the wrong model,"
compared to Dorner's.

It was, however, a pick-up truck.

The manhunt is now focused on Bear Mountain, although the local ski resort is hoping to be open this weekend.

February 07, 2013

With Turbo Tax Tim Geithner on the way out, Team Obama is casting about for a good diversity pick, to wit, diversity in the area of tax compliance. Rumored Commerce pick Penny Pritzker, a top Obama fund raiser, looks like a great choice.

February 06, 2013

Duncan (He can't be Sirius) Black, the econ degree holder formerly known as Atrios, explains in USA Today that baby boomers face a retirement crisis which can only be solved by raising both taxes and Social Security benefits. Really:

Recent and near-retirees, the first major cohort of
the 401(k) era, do not have nearly enough in retirement savings to even
come close to maintaining their current lifestyles.

We need an across the board increase in Social Security retirement
benefits of 20% or more. We need it to happen right now, even if that
means raising taxes on high incomes or removing the salary cap in Social
Security taxes.

People want need (!) a more generous retirement plan and they want need someone else to pay for it! Hmm, one might have thought that means-testing of Social Security benefits would tie in here somewhere, if Social Security is really going to be re-imagined as a full welfare program for the elderly. And I assume that even though the cap on taxable earning may be removed, the cap on benefits will not be.

Fuzzy math is a key part of the argument:

According to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College,
the median household retirement account balance in 2010 for workers
between the ages of 55-64 was just $120,000. For people expecting to
retire at around age 65, and to live for another 15 years or more, this
will provide for only a trivial supplement to Social Security benefits.

Hmm. Assuming a zero real return, $150,000 spent evenly over fifteen years is $8,000 per year. And what are Social Security benefits?

And that's for people who actually have a retirement account of some kind. A third of households do not.
For these people, their sole retirement income, aside from potential
aid from friends and family, comes from Social Security, for which the
current average monthly benefit is $1,230.

Well, $1,230 per month is about $14,760 per year. Is $8,000 really a "trivial" supplement to that amount? Would $8,000 be a "trivial" supplement to double that amount, i.e., $30,000 per year? I encourage folks who think so to make a trivial donation here.

Moving the goalposts on the objective of Social Security is also part of the 'logic':

If the consensus is that we need policies in place to ensure that the
vast majority of people have at least a comfortable retirement, then we
need to adjust our current failing policies. Expecting people to save
sufficiently for their retirement, even if those savings are subsidized
by our tax code, is unrealistic.

"It
is impossible under any social insurance system to provide
ideal security for every individual. The practical objective
is to pay benefits that provide a minimum degree of social
security—as a basis upon which the worker, through his own
efforts, will have a better chance to provide adequately for
his individual security." -- From the Report of the
Social Security Board recommending the changes which were
embodied in the 1939 Amendments.

In other words, if people want comfort, they can get it on their own dime.

Finally, we are treated to a long exposition explaining that college grads and advanced degree holders are burdened with debt, so how can anyone be expected to save for their own retirement? The suggested answer is to raise taxes on someone else.

One might think that focusing on policies that promoted growth and employment would be the way to secure our future, but evidently, taxing the rich is the only way forward. In Atrios' world.

To be fair, this is a dreadful time to be retiring, with both housing prices and 401(k)s wiped out by the Great Recession. But raising Social Security benefits and taxes indiscriminately and forever is an overreaction, and a misdirected one.

PRINCETON, NJ -- At least two-thirds of Americans
favor each of five specific measures designed to address immigration
issues -- ranging from 68% who would vote for increased government
spending on security measures and enforcement at U.S. borders, to 85%
who would vote for a requirement that employers verify the immigration
status of all new hires. More than seven in 10 would vote for a pathway
to citizenship for undocumented immigrants now living in this country.

I don't see how a respondent could have expressed a preference for sequential, conditional passage of these reforms, i.e., legal residency/pathway to citizenship/amnesty *after* border security and workplace enforcement have been demonstrated as legal and effective.

The question was:

Next, suppose that on Election Day you could vote on key issues as well as candidates. Would you vote for or against a law that would – [RANDOM ORDER]?

Well, I suppose I would vote against legal residency in this election and wait to see how the other elements fell into place, with the hope of voting on residency in a subsequent election. As to how other respondents tackled this question, who can tell?

February 04, 2013

Comprising two-thirds of the United States’s total estimated shale oil
reserves and covering 1,750 square miles from Southern to Central
California, the Monterey Shale could turn California into the nation’s
top oil-producing state and yield the kind of riches that far smaller
shale oil deposits have showered on North Dakota and Texas.

For decades, oilmen have been unable to extricate the Monterey Shale’s
crude because of its complex geological formation, which makes
extraction quite expensive. But as the oil industry’s technological
advances succeed in unlocking oil from increasingly difficult locations,
there is heady talk that California could be in store for a new oil
boom.

A casual reader might infer that the new developments include the fracking and horiziontal drilling techniques that have revolutionized oil production in North Dakota and Texas. However, CNN explains that the problem is more complicated than simply moving established technology westward:

As a result of the San Andres fault,
California's geologic layers are folded like an accordion rather than
simply stacked on top of each other like they are in other Shale states.
The folds have naturally cracked the shale rock, and much of
California's current "conventional" oil production -- the third largest
in the nation -- is thought to come from the Monterey.

But the folds mean recent advancements that have
made shale oil and gas profitable to extract -- horizontal drilling
combined with hydraulic fracturing -- don't work as well in California. It's hard to drill horizontally if the shale is not flat.

Plus, it appears the Monterey is made up of
shale rock that doesn't respond as well to hydraulic fracturing -- the
controversial practice known as fracking
that involves injecting water, sand and chemicals into the ground under
high pressure to crack the rock and allow the oil and gas to flow.

OK. The Times also present the environmental issue as a simple scuffle of Greens versus Frackers. Here is a Geoffrey Styles, energy consultant delivering some nuance:

However it is eventually unlocked, the Monterey shale offers significant
benefits to California. Start with the fact that the state's oil
production has been in steady decline
since the mid-1980s. Together with the depletion of Alaska's North
Slope field, that has meant that the US West Coast, which was once a net
exporter of oil, now imports increasing quantities of oil--half of it from OPEC--to meet local demand. That trend has continued even as the import dependence of the rest of the country has fallen substantially
due to higher production and receding demand. The Monterey could slash
California's imports, while adding billions of dollars a year to the
local economy and to the shaky state budget, along with lots of good
jobs.

It could even provide environmental benefits. Restoring oil
self-sufficiency would reduce the risk of spills from the tankers
bringing in imports, while refilling existing infrastructure. And if
the Monterey yields oil similar in quality to the light, sweet crude now
being produced from the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales, it could actually
cut both greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution by reducing
the refining intensity required to turn the state's current diet of
heavier crudes into ultra-low sulfur gasoline and diesel fuel.

However, Mr. Styles' heart is not yet racing:

I suspect from my research in the last few weeks that anyone betting on
an imminent explosion of oil output from the Monterey shale is likely to
be disappointed. The process seems likely to be slower than elsewhere,
though with a bigger potential payoff. But that doesn't make it
irrelevant to a state that has set its sights on being at the forefront
of the transformation to cleaner energy sources. California still
consumes 1.8 million barrels per day
of petroleum products, and it will burn many more billions of barrels
on its way to its chosen future of electric vehicles running on wind and
solar power, and trucks and buses burning compressed or liquefied
natural gas. Developing the Monterey shale won't solve all of
California's energy challenges and might create a few new ones, yet it
could prove another timely contribution from a local oil industry that
has been a major driver of the state's economy for well over a century.

The current liberal catechism espoused by Dianne Feinsgtein in her role as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee is that enhanced interrogation played no role in piecing together the trail to Osama Bin Laden. This belief led to a recent dust-up with the acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, who was asked by committee members to document his assertion, in a letter to CIA employees, that intelligence gleaned from enhanced interrogation contributed to finding Bin Laden.

Now Leon Panetta has wandered off the reservation. Maybe! Different news outlets are characterizing his remarks differently.

Leon Panetta says ‘enhanced interrogation’ tactics played a role in death of Osama bin Laden

Ooops! Go, Team Red!

In fact, Panetta said pretty much the same thing as Michael Morell of the CIA. From the CBS account:

"First of all, it's a movie," Panetta said on NBC's "Meet the Press". "Let's remember that."

Saying
he "lived the real story," Panetta added that "in order to put the
puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there was a
lot of intelligence. There were a lot of pieces out there that were part
of that puzzle."

Panetta went on to say that there was at least some truth
to the notion that enhanced interrogation was part of the hunt for bin
Laden.

"Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics
that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used," he
admitted. "But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence
without having to resort to that."

NBC's Chuck Todd followed up: "And you think you could have gotten it without any?" Panetta replied: "I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that."

So as a matter of speculation, Panetta agrees that maybe enhanced interrogation was not necessary, but he continues to claim it contributed to putting the trail together.

Per CBS, Panetta has said before that enhanced interrogation played a minor role. And even though a similar claim got Michael Morell in trouble, Sen. Feinstein's original expostulation did not rule out the possibilty that enhanced interrogation made a minor contribution to finding Bin Laden:

Statements made by Mr. Rodriguez and other former senior government
officials about the role of the CIA interrogation program in locating
Usama bin Laden (UBL) are inconsistent with CIA records. We are
disappointed that Mr. Rodriguez and others, who left government
positions prior to the UBL operation and are not privy to all of the
intelligence that led to the raid, continue to insist that the CIA’s
so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” used many years ago were a
central component of our success. This view is misguided and
misinformed.

The roots of the UBL operation stretch back nearly a decade and
involve hundreds, perhaps thousands, of intelligence professionals who
worked non-stop to connect and analyze many fragments of information,
eventually leading the United States to Usama Bin Laden’s location in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. The suggestion that the operation was carried out
based on information gained through the harsh treatment of CIA detainees
is not only inaccurate, it trivializes the work of individuals across
multiple U.S. agencies that led to UBL and the eventual operation.

One might read that as refuting the notion that enhanced interrogation was "central" to our sucess, and that the raid was "based on" that intelligence.

Well, even if Ms. Feinstein was leaving the door open to a minor role for enhanced interrogation back in April of 2012, she is in full Enhanced Denial mode now. Let's see if Leon Panetta is called to atonement by the committee.

February 03, 2013

The NY Times editors are back to gun control and back to making stuff up. This morning, their target is Gayle Trotter, who spoke at the Senate hearing last week. Her message, ever so vexing to the Times - women with guns are safer against criminals.

Their intro:

Dangerous Gun Myths

The debate over what to do to reduce gun violence in America hit an
absurd low point on Wednesday when a Senate witness tried to portray a
proposed new ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines as some
sort of sexist plot that would disproportionately hurt vulnerable women
and their children.

The witness was Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s
Forum, a right-wing public policy group that provides pseudofeminist
support for extreme positions that are in fact dangerous to women. She
told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the limits on firepower
proposed by Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, would harm women
because an assault weapon “in the hands of a young woman defending her
babies in her home becomes a defense weapon.” She spoke of the “peace of
mind” and “courage” a woman derives from “knowing she has a
scary-looking gun” when she’s fighting violent criminals.

The Times editors promptly descend into fantasy and fiction:

It is not at all clear where Ms. Trotter gained her insight into
confrontations between women and heavily armed intruders, since it is
not at all clear that sort of thing happens often.

What is very clear is that the Times editors either did not read her testimony or chose to misrepresent it. She opened with the story of Sarah McKinley, the Oklahoma woman who spent twenty minutes on the phone with a 911 dispatcher and eventually used her shotgun on one of two intruders. (As to how often this type of incident happens, I would say, more often than Times readers may realize, since their first mention of Ms. McKinely is in this editorial).

Ms. Trotter went on:

Guns make women safer. Most violent offenders actually do not use firearms, which makes guns the great equalizer. In fact, over 90 percent of violent crimes occur without a firearm. Over the most recent decade, from 2001 to 2010, “about 6 percent to 9 percent of all violent victimizations were committed with firearms,” according to a federal study.1 Violent criminals rarely use a gun to threaten or attack women. Attackers use their size and physical strength, preying on women who are at a severe disadvantage.

So Ms. Trotter talked about violent criminals who are equipped with typical male size and strength and specifically noted they are unlikely to be carrying a firearm. In TimesWorld, that became "heavily armed intruders". Hmm, maybe the editors meant "heavy armed" intruders - sort of a "Popeye guns" thing.

The editors continue:

It is tempting to dismiss her notion that an AR-15 is a woman’s best
friend as the kooky reflex response of someone ideologically opposed to
gun control laws...

The editors then offer an argument that makes sense if you don't think about it:

The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially
negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway,
director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making
women safer, a gun in the home is “a particularly strong risk factor”
for female homicides and the intimidation of women.

In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women
increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to
a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003.
Further, there was “no clear evidence” that victims’ access to a gun
reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe
of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun
in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with
no gun at home.

That is good intel for women in an abusive relationship, but maybe not so important for the rest of us. Which, as an aside, is an ongoing problem for the Nanny State - good advice for the population as a whole (Don't be in an abusive relationship with a guy with a gun!) may not be relevant advice for many members of that population. I'm not an epidemologist but this seems like an example of the Prevention Paradox, where a frequent puzzle is whether to attempt to treat the whole population or just high-risk sub-groups (and a Rose by any other name would still be fascinating).

Pressing on:

Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk. An analysis by
Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a
background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate
partners at a much lower rate.

They don't provide a source and I can't run down that reference so I don't know what to conclude from their assertion, but here is a Mayors Against Gun Violence White Paper, which includes in the footnotes this paper:

Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results From a Multisite Case Control Study

Among the conclusions overlooked by the Times editors:

Although the abuser’s access to a firearm increased femicide risk,
victims’ risk of being killed by their intimate partner was lower when
they lived apart from the abuser and had sole access to a firearm
(adjusted OR = 0.22).

To be fair, that was inconclusive:

A victim’s access to a gun could plausibly reduce her risk of being
killed, at least if she does not live with the abuser. A small
percentage (5%) of both case and control women lived apart from the
abuser and owned a gun, however, and there was no clear evidence of
protective effects.

In any case, with these statistics the Times is not promoting the assault weapons ban but instead is arguing for broader background checks, which looks like a winning idea with the public.

They close with a strawman:

The idea that guns are essential to home defense and women’s safety is a
myth.

"Essential"? No one is arguing that guns are a "must have", only that they ought to be a matter of individual choice.

It should not be allowed to block the new gun controls that the
country so obviously needs.

They led with their assault on 'assault weapons' and magazines and closed with statistics about background checks, so I guess it is still obvious to the editors that their full agenda is urgently and obviously needed. As to whether broader background checks would actually stop abusive males from obtaining guns (legally or illegally), I have no idea.

NOTE TO SCHOOL ADMNINISTRATORS EVERYWHERE: If an earnest teacher overhears two teen lads talking about "Popeye guns", don't take 'em down too hard without a bit more info.

Speaking at the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference in Chicago on 31
May 2012, thorium advocates made it clear that the meltdowns at
Fukushima's nuclear power stations have underlined the need to move away
from conventional designs to other nuclear technologies. Japan,
unsurprisingly, has taken the lead after energy provider Chubu Electric
Power recently launched a $1.2bn research programme that aims to
strengthen the safety of nuclear plants - also through the use of
thorium.

International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS)
researcher Takashi Kamei told attendees at the Chicago conference that
the utility, which serves about 16 million people in central Japan, is
specifically looking into an alternative reactor design which would use
liquid thorium as fuel in a molten salt reactor - a U-turn from the
solid uranium, water-cooled reactors such as the ones used at the
Fukushima plant.

The good news is that, with Japan and China both pushing hard and India interested, progress in understanding and adopting thorium reactors should be rapid. Closer to home, Bill Gates and Google are also interested in the clean nuclear alternative. The Department of Energy is dusting off old research and helping the Chinese, but, like fracking, this looks like an idea that will proceed in spite of Obama rather than because of him.

The Obama press office explains that the US is having yet another reset with Russia and it is all Putin's fault. Apparently, savvy White House strategists are employing the same subtle strategem with Putin's team that has worked so well with the House Republicans - don't talk to them and wait for the fever to break:

American officials say President Obama
will decline an invitation — publicly trumpeted by Mr. Lavrov and the
Russian news media — to visit Moscow on his own this spring. Instead, he
will wait until September, when the G-20 conference of the world’s
largest economies is scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg, Russia.

And while Secretary of State John Kerry has yet to select his first
overseas destination, officials said Russia had been ruled out.

The main goal seems to be to send a message that the United States views
much of its relationship with Russia as optional, and while pressing
matters will continue to be handled on a transactional basis, Washington
plans to continue criticizing Russia on human rights and other
concerns. As for the anti-Americanism, the new approach might be
described as shrug and snub.

Nevertheless, Mr. Blinken said there was real potential to work through
the differences. And American officials are clearly betting that Mr.
Putin desires a prominent role on the world stage and will ultimately
decide to re-engage.

In assessing the risks and rewards of this approach the Times is fully divorced from reality:

At the same time, outside its borders, Russia remains indisputably
relevant on a range of global issues, including the threats and
opportunities from climate change in the Arctic and the political
uncertainty in North Korea, that prevent the United States from pulling
back too far.

The NY Times describes Team Obama's latest climbdown on their "Free Contraception For All!" plan. The Times skips past the bit where the unicorns deliver the free pills (I was hoping for a video!), but does dryly note this:

The latest proposed change is the third in the last 15 months, all
announced on Fridays, as President Obama has struggled to balance
women’s rights, health care and religious liberty.

The Times editors laud the latest and retreat to their own reality. First, they demonize the opposition!

For the past year, the administration has been battered by lawsuits and
denunciations from religious conservatives that its health care reforms
violate religious liberties by requiring employers to provide free birth
control coverage even if the employers have moral objections. Those
attacks were designed to try to discredit the health care reform law and
hurt President Obama politically by portraying him, falsely, as an
opponent of religious freedom.

The attacks were designed to undermine Obama? Gee, and here I thought that institutions such as Georgetown University were trying to restore the status quo ante, so they could continue doing whatever they had been doing for the two centuries prior to Obama's Glorious Ascent. My bad.

The Times editors then retreat to their own legal hidey-hole:

Neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court precedents give religiously
affiliated institutions the right to be exempted from a neutral law of
general applicability. The First Amendment is not authorization for
religious entities or individuals claiming a sincere religious objection
to the law to impose their religious beliefs on society.

...provided that a free exercise claim would prevail unless the government
could show a “compelling” reason for holding a religious group to the
same legal requirements that applied to everyone else.

Over in reality, there is a second element to the test, as described by Ed Whelan and David Rivkin in the WSJ:

The 1993 law restored the same protections of religious freedom that had been understood to exist pre-Smith.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act states that the federal
government may "substantially burden" a person's "exercise of religion"
only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person "is
in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest" and "is the least
restrictive means of furthering" that interest.

As to whether the current Administration rules are the least restrictive way forward in a world with, for example, Federally subsidized health clinics, let's say the jury is out.

Diligent readers will recall that we have kicked this around before. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, passed in the glorious early days of the Clinton Administration before Newt et al crashed the party, remains a topic our friends on the left would prefer not to discuss. Per the WSJ it "passed unanimously by the House of Representatives and by a 97-3 vote in
the Senate" and "was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993", but I assume that, like the Patriot Act, Democrats will want to claim they were bullied into voting for it. Can we all agree to blame Bush?

February 01, 2013

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration adopted a strict definition of
affordable health insurance on Wednesday that will deny federal
financial assistance to millions of Americans with modest incomes who
cannot afford family coverage offered by employers.

In deciding
whether an employer's health plan is affordable, the Internal Revenue
Service said it would look at the cost of coverage only for an
individual employee, not for a family. Family coverage might be
prohibitively expensive, but federal subsidies would not be available to
help buy insurance for children in the family.

The policy decision came in a final regulation interpreting ambiguous language in the 2010 health care law.

Ooopos! We had Boldly Predicted that Team Obama would go with the budget-busting "fix" of expanding the elibibility for subsidies. I guess not.

For the
second time in a year, the Obama administration has backtracked on its
requirement to make religious institutions pay for contraception.

A new policy announced Friday further expanded the exemption to
Obamacare: Women will still be able to get the same health benefits, but
certain religious employers won’t have to pay for them. Instead,
institutions that insure themselves can use a third-party to find a
separate health insurance plan to pay for and provide the
contraceptives.

Bitter-Clinger leaders were non-committal:

New York Cardinal
Timothy Dolan, president of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, was non-committal about the new policy.

“We welcome the opportunity to study the proposed regulations
closely,” Dolan said in a statement. “We look forward to issuing a more
detailed statement later.”

The Catholic Church has survived for two thousand years; they will survive Obama.

Conservatives Shocked to Discover Healthcare in America is Really Expensive

"Can you respond to this?" asks a reader via Twitter. "Conservative
friends are posting it all over." It turns out that "this" is a headline from CNS:

IRS: Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family

Apparently conservatives are outraged by this, but I have one
question for them: just how much do you think healthcare coverage costs?
Do you have any clue at all?

Well, I would have guessed about $15,000, but that is only becasue I have been following this question of affordability and subsidies. But guess who may not have been following it?

The average cost of healthcare coverage for a family is currently about $16,000,
and by 2015 (the base year for the IRS examples) that will probably be
around $18,000 or so. And that's for employer-sponsored plans.
Individual plans are generally steeper, so $20,000 isn't a bad guess. It
might be a little high, but not by much. And the family in question
will, of course, be eligible for generous subsidies that bring this cost
down substantially, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. They won't
actually pay $20,000 per year.

Maybe they will be eligible, maybe they won't. With ObamaCare, getting married will be a luxury only the rich can afford.

Yet now, where the topic is mental illness and access to guns, the emphasis is exclusively on homicides; in fact, the word "suicide" does not appear in their article.

Yes, it is a puzzling use of statistics - the link between magazine capacity and suicide is tenuous at best, but one might imagine that the links between mental illness, suicide and access to guns are much stronger.

But its TimesWorld, so there may be a subtle agenda at play, and maybe "gun violence" is not their real concern.

In their fervor to take action against gun violence after the shooting in Newtown,
Conn., a growing number of state and national politicians are promoting
a focus on mental illness as a way to help prevent further killings.

Legislation to revise existing mental health
laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including
Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health
practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous
patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama
has ordered “a national dialogue” on mental health, and a variety of
bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.

But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious
mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4
percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the
general population to be the victims of violent crime.

Well, the link between violence and mental illness is not all in your head, as we learn much later in the story:

Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness
and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an
untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent,
especially when drug or alcohol abuse
is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental
disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in
Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about
his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13
others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords,
was severely mentally ill.

But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in
the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research
indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who
are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to
involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons,
which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the
mentally ill.

Hmm - "such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in
the United States". That could be a comment about killings by rifle versus killings by handgun (6,220 by handgun, 323 by rifle, and another 1,587 by "type not stated" in 2011 per the FBI UCR), so why the urgency on banning assault rifles?

Under gentle but persistent questioning from Senator Carl Levin, the
Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the panel, Mr. Hagel said that he
had voted against some unilateral American sanctions against Iran
in 2001 and 2002 because “I thought that there might be other ways to
employ our vast ability to harness power and allies” and “we were at a
different place with Iran at that time.”

Mr. Hagel faltered at one point, saying shortly before noon that he
strongly supported the president’s policy of “containment” of Iran. He
was quickly handed a note, which he read and then corrected himself,
“Obviously, we don’t have a position on containment.”

At that point Mr. Levin interjected, “We do have a position on
containment, which is we do not favor containment.” The Obama
administration’s policy on Iran obtaining nuclear weapons remains prevention. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Questions about Iran - you might have thought Hagel could see those coming.